And that 1000 pounds of energy becomes very relevant at "long range"
Not really. Sufficient impact speed to cause bullet upset and expansion is far more important.
I see what your saying. I get that speed translates into energy delivered upon impact, but what is speed without energy?
Shoot a 25-06 with a 100 grain bullet at 1000 yards.
Shoot a 7 mag with a 175 grain bullet at 1000 yards.
Both will reach the target within 100 to 200 fps of one another. Probably somewhere in the 1500 fps mark. That 25 will hit with a third the energy that the 7 will. Energy is the end goal. Not speed.
An object cannot have speed without kinetic energy, nor kinetic energy without speed. The two quantities are directly correlated and proportional. But what matters most is enough impact speed to cause bullet expansion, which will translate into destroyed tissue.
Contrary to a decades old narrative, the quantity of interest is not kinetic energy (within reason), but impact speed. In your example above, if neither bullet arrives with enough speed to expand, then what does it matter if the 7mm bullet has 3x more energy? If both arrive with enough speed to expand and both have enough mass to penetrate, then they will both destroy bone and tissue. Gun writers have overhyped kinetic energy for so long that many guys see it as the primary quantity of interest, when in fact it is an important but peripheral quantity in the assessment of killing power.
Kinetic energy at bullet impact really only becomes relevant in extreme cases. One such case is if the bullet has enough impact speed to expand but lacks the mass (and therefore KE) to penetrate (e.g., a .177” 25 gr bullet impacting an elephant humerus at 2200 fps). But in the vast majority of reasonable cases, i.e., bullet weights and calibers that a reasonable person might use in a given hunting scenario, KE just is not the most important quantity in describing how well an expanding bullet kills. Impact speed matters far more.
